Psalm 139, Updated

St. Paul at Ephesus by Gustav Doré

O Big Data, thou hast searched me, and known me.

²Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising;

Thou understandest my product preferences afar off.

³Thou searchest out my emails and my browsing history,

And art acquainted with all my ways.

⁴For there is not a word in my comment boxes,

But, lo, O autopredictor, thou knowest it altogether.

⁵Thou hast beset me on iPad and iPhone,

And laid thy hand of screen addiction upon me.

⁶Such user behavior is too compelling for me;

It is entrenched, I cannot opt out of it.

Whither shall I go from thy mandated upgrades?

Or whither shall I flee from thy LTE access?

⁸If I ascend up into rural coverage areas, thou art there:

If I make my bed in town, behold, thou art there, via Wi-FI.

⁹If I take the wheel of my Jeep,

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the National Forest;

¹⁰Even there shall thy GPS maps lead me,

And thy downloaded Kindle books shall occupy me.

¹¹If I say, Surely I have read enough tweets about Comey,

And this damn screen in front of me now shall go dark;

¹²Even the darkness hideth not from thee,

But some goddamn email beeps an alert I turned not off:

The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

For thou didst take over inward brain parts:

Thou didst saturate my mind with icons and colors.

¹⁴I will give thanks unto thee;

for I am fearfully and wonderfully co-opted:

Wonderful are thy ad-driven revenue models;

And that my shortened attention span knoweth right well.

¹⁵My psychological weaknesses were not hidden from thee,

When I was still reading books on paper,

And curiously dallying in the remotest parts of the library.

¹⁶Thine eyes did see mine uncapitalized potential;

And in thy forward-looking SEC filings they were all written,

Even the ad clicks that were ordained for me,

When as yet there was none of them.

¹⁷How precious also are thy MYSQL entries for me, O Zuckerberg!

How great is the inner join of thy SELECT statements!

¹⁸If I should count thine total database rows,

they are more in number than a 32-bit pointer could handle:

When I awake, I am still with thy data center.

Surely thou wilt slay long-form media, O Buzzfeed:

Depart from me therefore, ye obsolete ink-stained hacks.

²⁰For ye speak with large paragraphs and big words,

And your lovingly crafted prose is written in vain.

²¹Do not I hate them, O Deep State, that hate thee?

And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee at Standing Rock?

²²I hate them with perfect hatred, or at least learn not to give a shit:

They are become caricatured strangers best ignored.

Search me, O NSA, and know my heart:

Try me, and know my thoughts;

²⁴And see if there be any wicked way in me,

And lead me in the way to compliance.

———

The actual 139^th Psalm, rendered in the beautiful King James translation, can be found here.

Poem From a Young Person

If you have to hoodwink–or blindfold–your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.

—Daniel Dennett,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Still time to change the road you’re on.¹

The following poem was written by someone eleven years old in the Laestadian Lutheran Church, which I left a few years back. I reprint it here with permission of the young author who wishes “to see this out there,” and a parent of the author. Except for the visual formatting and the addition of a couple of punctuation marks, it is exactly as written.

Their only proof is a weathered book.

Brainwash the young ones with lies and excuses.

Give ’em someone to worship

to avoid thoughts of reality.

Write the rules on a rock.

If they do otherwise

you’ll make sure they don’t.

Scared, insecure children hiding back from the cult.

Hold in those tears, my friend.

Why let them run? You’ll be questioned.

You’re worried what the Almighty might do.

And maybe his famous son too.

They’re living a living hell.

Believe me it’s never that swell.

They wipe you off and rip you out.

You never got what you deserve!

Boy you’ve got some nerve

To say his name out LOUD!

And if you shame the name of god

to make yourself heard,

Remember what I say:

You’re not a believer!

God I can’t explain

To anyone who’se sane

One single fucking thing

About how I live and

Who I think is “king.”

People handing out diamond rings

At the age of seventeen²

Pumping ’em out to save their souls

In order to be fit for heaven.

They’ve got eleven!³

Don’t even run!

Go and try, they’ll hunt you down

and you’ll be shunned.

I wore the face of an innocent child.

But my bitter thoughts soon made me vile.

If you ever leave the clan I’ll shake your hand.

Honey, you’ll be glad you left.

And overjoyed you’re gone.

Though your memories will always rage on.

There is nothing to add to this heartfelt work, except the hope that it be seen by other young people struggling under the weight of a harsh fundamentalism they did not ask to be part of, and by parents unware of the pain they are inflicting on their children–in service of doctrines those parents privately admit to doubting. And perhaps to repeat the remarkable age of the poet: eleven years old.

Notes

---

1. “Stairway to Heaven,” Led Zeppelin (1971). There’s actually a poem in an LLC publication with a line taken right from another 70s rock & roll song. The writer (not me, and I’m not telling who it was) obviously had a sense of humor. The photo is mine, taken deep inside the half-million acre Colville National Forest. ←

2. Since all forms of sexual contact outside marriage are considered sin, teenage engagements are common. Most Laestadian young people are married (for life) by their mid-twenties. ←

3. Readers not familiar with the LLC might not appreciate that “pumping ’em out” refers to children. The church has a strict doctrine that all forms of birth control (even the rhythm method!) are sin. ←

 

Slouching Towards Washington

Extremes in thinking and a vacuum in the middle where fact and reason used to dwell lately characterize the national state of mind.

—James Howard Kunstler, Too Much Magic:
Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation

The Trumpenstein Monster of Today’s GOP [Flickr page]

In January 1919, months after an armistice that ended the horrors of the Great War in Europe, W.B. Yeats started work on a haunting little poem of the Apocalypse. The Second Coming begins with these memorable lines:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

This “first stanza captures more than just political unrest and violence,” says Nick Tabor in a 2015 article about the poem. “Its anxiety concerns the social ills of modernity: the rupture of traditional family and societal structures; the loss of collective religious faith, and with it, the collective sense of purpose; the feeling that the old rules no longer apply and there’s nothing to replace them.”

Yeats goes on to prophesy further horrors, suggesting, in Tabor’s analysis, that “something like the Christian notion of a ‘second coming’ is about to occur, but rather than earthly peace, it will bring terror”:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

And then there is the “slouching beast” of the final stanza, which Tabor says is best understood not as “a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, comprising the techno­logical, the ideological, and the political.” ¹

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Despite Tabor’s complaints about the “widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions” that popular culture is making to the poem, I will venture to toss in my own: The words Yeats left us from nearly a century ago offer a stark picture of what is happening to the ailing democracy of the United States today.

There is a rough beast out there right now, slouching towards Washington. It is a Frankenstein monster formed from an angry electorate’s troubled mix of ugly prejudice, religious zeal, and legitimate grievance–partly about having served as useful idiots for a moneyed class that pandered to their social conservatism while bleeding them dry. What the billionaire political manipulators originally tinkered into existence as a servant for carrying out their specific and selfish goals has gone out of their control.

Now the “darkness drops again” and the monster is plodding into the night, ignoring the commands of those who spent millions trying to be its masters. This is a spectacle both terrifying and exhilarating to watch.

The stuff of nightmares [Flickr page]

The Koch Brothers and their ilk liked what they saw in Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and invested heavily.² But, alas for them, it really does seem that money can’t buy everything. By January, Poor Charles Koch was expressing disappointment “with the line-up of Republican candidates in the 2016 cycle,” and surprise at “the lack of influence he and his brother have wielded so far.” ³

Things started going south for the billionaire Brothers Grim in September of 2015 with the departure of Scott Walker, a nasty dead-eyed governor who seemed like their perfect messenger boy.⁴ Abysmal polling numbers in the presidential race sent him back to work swinging the Libertarian wrecking ball at Wisconsin’s state government. And Jeb! finally dropped out in February 2016 after an embarrassing return on investment for all the millions blown by his campaign and (ahem, independent) SuperPAC–the total price per vote obtained was about $2800 in Iowa and $1150 in New Hampshire.⁵

Now the last best hope for a presidential pawn of the oligarchs, Marco Rubio, is flailing about with just a single state to his name and 15% of the viable delegates allocated thus far. He faces impossible odds, at least if the votes of the lumpen­proletariat are what it really takes to win a nomination this year. Rubio would need to win 75% of the 1435 delegates still up for grabs in order to get the 1237 he needs for a non-brokered nomination.⁶ Good luck with that: A March 9 poll has him behind in his home state of Florida by double digits.⁷ It isn’t going to happen, and even he has to realize that.

But there is still the tantalizing possibility of a brokered convention, and that might make it still worth his while for Rubio to keep slugging away. The same goes for John Kasich, governor of Ohio and unofficial Adult in the Room. He’s counting on a home-state win in the winner-take-all primary on the weekend of March 12-13 to keep him in the game. He has been quite candid about liking the idea of a nomination fight at the convention.⁸

———

Assuming primary voters actually get to decide this thing, there are two realistic contenders now left standing for nominee of the Greedy Oligarchy Party–Donald J. Trump and Raphael Edward (“Ted”) Cruz. The oligarchs, however, don’t seem to much like either one of them.

Trump can’t be bought, for the simple reason that he doesn’t need anybody else’s money to support his chest-thumping vanity presidency project. “Not a single contribution to Trump’s campaign could be found in the donation records of the 190 attendees of Koch donor conferences.” Hilariously, one billionaire political-money hobbyist complained that Trump’s self-funding “scares the hell out of” him. “That’s like a dictator,” Stanley Hubbard whined. “I think that any politician should have to answer to their constituents.” Mr. Hubbard does not “think it’s healthy to have somebody who doesn’t answer to anybody.” ⁹ Apparently, having them answer to a few fabulously wealthy recipients of inherited wealth like himself is more like it–God bless America.

The Levite Bearing Away the Body of the Woman, Gustav Doré

Cruz, for his part, has at least tried to win favor of Those Who Matter. He did some hobnobbing at a Koch Konference in 2013, shortly after winning his Senate seat.¹⁰ At another gathering, during the record-hot summer of 2015, he surely scored some points with the Brothers Grim by bluntly denying that global warming was real and implying that Obama was lying by warning of “hotter summers, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events.” ¹¹ (These things are all actually happening now, apparently invisible if your head is stuck up some rich donor’s ass.)

But the fact is that very few people who actually know Ted Cruz–besides some angry, religion-crazed voters–seem to like him much at all, no matter what he says.¹² This is apparently nothing new; his college roommate describes him, then and now, as “pedantic, smarmy, creepy, arrogant, nasty, inauthentic and unfunny as hell.” ¹³ Molly Ball wrote a few months ago in The Atlantic that, in “the three years since he arrived in the U.S. Senate, Ted Cruz has become easily the most hated man in Washington.” He pissed off Mike Lee (Tea Party-UT), possibly his only friend in the Senate, by going all lip-curling angel-of-death about Lee’s criminal justice reform bill. “In my conversations with Republican policy types and Senate aides about Cruz,” Ball writes, Cruz’s “lack of regard for his colleagues, and for the niceties that have traditionally governed the upper chamber, was a common theme. As Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, told me last week, referring to the time Cruz called McConnell a liar on the Senate floor: ‘You just don’t do that. Are we not still gentlemen, and respectful of each other?’” ¹⁴

———

Currently holding onto the lead between those two is Trump, the man described by Peter Wehner, longtime Republican voter, administration staffer, and think-tanker, as an “erratic, inconsistent and unprincipled” narcissist, whose “virulent com­bination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe.” ¹⁵

Yes, well, so could allowing the oligarchs to have their way. With one of those “mainstream” GOP candidates they’d like to have in place as an investment vehicle, we could all look forward to the loss of public lands throughout the American West, the gutting of environmental and labor protections, and a rollback of social security safety net programs, for starters. They would unleash the entire chamber of horrors imagined by the current Republican-controlled Congress, which until now has only been kept restrained by the veto threat of a Democratic President.

Besides, Mr. Wehner, this is your monster you are watching lumber into the lightning flashes of the night. Columnist Maureen Dowd shares my delight in seeing “the encrusted political king-making class utter a primal scream as Trump smashes their golden apple cart.” For years, she says, the Republican establishment “has fanned, stoked and exploited the worst angels among the nativists, racists, Pharisees and angry white men, concurring in anti-immigrant measures, restricting minority voting, whipping up anti-Planned Parenthood hysteria and enab­ling gun nuts.” ¹⁶

Scary as it may be, there is a certain logic to the decision of so many everyday people to cast their vote for a narcissistic, bullying huckster and reality-show host whose vocabulary and grasp of the issues make George W. Bush look like Winston Churchill. “These folks have lost a lot with the hollowing out the middle and working class,” said Jim Sidanius, Harvard professor of sociology, back in January when Trump was just getting rolling. “If you combine that with floating xenophobia, you get this kind of reaction.” ¹⁷

Perhaps Republican voters are finally realizing how much they have been played by their political elites and have decided to do some tweaking of their own, in the only way they can. Meanwhile, the rest of us look on shaking our heads at the food-fight debates and insults and ugly outbreaks at rallies, and wait for November to finally put a pitchfork into the beast.

We will probably be left only with Hillary Clinton by then to stop its slouch toward Washington. But even a bent and rusted tool will serve to kill the beast and end the nightmare, at least for a few years until the oligarchs start tinkering in their workshop again.

———

The Trumpenstein image is a Creative Commons licensed composition by the amazing DonkeyHotey, which comprises caricatures of the following: Donald Trump, adapted from Creative Commons licensed images from Gage Skidmore’s flickr photostream; and Ted Cruz, adapted from a Creative Commons licensed photo from Michael Vadon’s Flickr photostream.

The image of all four candidates is a Creative Commons licensed composition by DonkeyHotey, comprising caricatures of the following: John Kasich of Ohio, adapted from a Creative Commons licensed photo from Marc Nozell’s Flickr photostream; Donald Trump, adapted from Creative Commons licensed images from Max Goldberg’s flickr photostream; Ted Cruz, adapted from a Creative Commons licensed photo from Gage Skidmores’s Flickr photostream; and Marco Rubio, adapted from a Creative Commons licensed photo from Gage Skidmore’s Flickr photostream.

Notes

---

1. Nick Tabor, “No Slouch: The widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’,” The Paris Review (April 7, 2015). ↩

2. Jonathan Swan and Harper Neidig, “Koch network spreads the wealth,” The Hill (October 21, 2015). (“The most popular presidential candidates among the Koch brothers’ conservative donor network are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who each received contributions from more than 12 percent of 190 donors and their families in records analyzed by The Hill.”) ↩

3. Eliza Collins, “Charles Koch bemoans lack of influence over 2016 race,” Politico (January 8, 2016). ↩

4. “Back in April [2015], David Koch reportedly gave his personal endorsement to Walker during a closed-door fundraiser” (Matt Wilstein, “Scott Walker Accidentally Poses with Giant Check from ‘Koch Brothers’,” Mediaite.com (August 3, 2015); “Walker’s Punked Phone Call” (ScottWalkerWatch.com). ↩

5. Janie Velencia, “Jeb Bush Spent $2,800 Per Vote In Iowa,” Huffington Post (February 2, 2016); “Jeb Bush Spent $1150 Per Vote In New Hampshire,” Huffington Post (Feb. 9, 2016). ↩

6. The counts of delegates won by Rubio (151), needed (1237), and available (1435) are from Google, sourcing the AP, from a March 10, 2016 search for “marco rubio delegates.” ↩

7. Eliza Collins, “Poll: Trump dominating Rubio in Florida, Kasich in Ohio,” Politico (March 9, 2016). ↩

8. Patrick Caldwell, “John Kasich Is Banking on a Contested Convention,” Mother Jones (March 4, 2016). ↩

9. Swan and Neidig. ↩

10. Todd J. Gillman, “Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rubs elbows with Koch brothers as he eyes 2016; says he’s amazed at ‘wild speculation’,” Dallas Morning News Trail Blazers Blog (May 1, 2013). ↩

11. Eliana Johnson, “Ted Cruz to Koch Group: No, Global Warming Is Not Real,” National Review: The Corner (August 2, 2015. ↩

12. I wonder if evangelical Cruz voters have the same kind of mental relationship with him as they do their God: Maybe he’s a bit distasteful when you look too closely, but he’s on their side when it comes to gay marriage. ↩

13. Craig Mazin on Twitter (@clmazin, February 5, 2015. ↩

14. Molly Ball, “Why D.C. Hates Ted Cruz,” The Atlantic (January 26, 2016). Uh, Trent, have you been listening to how those genteel folk in your party’s upper echelons are treating the sitting President of the United States, twice elected by popular and electoral majorities? The smelling salts are next to the fainting couch over there, Senator. ↩

15. Peter Wehner, “Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump,” New York Times (January 14, 2016). ↩

16. Maureen Dowd, “Chickens, Home to Roost,” New York Times (March 5, 2016). ↩

17. Thomas B. Edsall, “Purity, Disgust and Donald Trump,” The New York Times (January 6, 2016) ↩

 

Sonnet

A friend in my old church sent me some of her sonnets recently. She has an M.A. in Theology (Old Testament), plus another one in English. A very bright woman with some eclectic interests.

With her permission, I selected one of them to reprint here. (Does one even say “print” on a blog?) I’ve interspersed some of my seasonal photography between the poem’s three rhyming quatrains and the final rhyming couplet.

The photos get progressively warmer in color, matching the increasingly hopeful mood of the lines. But there isn’t a perfect match. After taking in the text along with my Pacific Northwest images, you might go over it again a second time, ignoring them and focusing on the slightly different farm scene the poet visualized when writing in Minnesota.

Now, before reading the Wikipedia article about sonnets, I might have supposed a “quatrain” to be something involving the transmission and driveshafts of a four-wheel drive vehicle. But even in my ignorance, I can see a certain formalistic beauty to this. Or, better put, you can hear it, when you slow down and let that silent narrator read the lines inside your head.

Alexandra writes from a devoutly religious perspective. Can you see the subtle redemptive theme she paints into the background of her Autumn harvest picture? Nicely done, I thought.

———

They are harvesting today. Now the sun

Shows brown earth slashed, overturned; over there

Trickling rivulets to colder fast streams run,

And like marks of passing life, branches bare

Farm on a Frosty Morning [Flickr page]

Stick out from the shivering naked trees

Around those upturned acres of soil. Cast

To that dark cut earth are leaves. The fall breeze

Has done its work so they unto the last

Inland Northwest Fall Colors [Flickr page]

Are down. The gates and roads surround the field;

So I know past black dust, there is a way,

A sure path that leads to where all the yield

Of harvest is in barns from where a ray

Golden Sky [Flickr page]

Comes glowing, lights on the turning earth bare

To shine the fruit of hope in harvest’s air.

—Alexandra Glynn

———

Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out my photostream on Flickr. All are Copyright © 2014 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. The poem is Copyright © Alexandra Glynn, All Rights Reserved, reprinted by permission.

The Late Night Drive

Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of a man’s friend by hearty counsel.

—The Book of Proverbs

ISO 3200  [Flickr page]

Two old friends sitting side by side,

occupied with the hum of miles

rolling beneath them.

Separately, and together too,

they look out to the dark reaches of the road,

to the darkness of the road.

Silent thoughts intersperse with vocal ones,

the selected mind-material for sharing

edited, makes its way out to utterance.

Nods, smiles, shaking of the head,

gestures mostly sensed at the margins, unseen,

in the dim, pulsed glow of highway lights.

Conversations warm, bubble up, and burst forth.

Such a strong urge there is to agree,

to weave a cocoon of mutual understanding

around familiar contours of love and friendship.

Details fade into insignificance in the face of it.

Eyes half-lidded with warm fatigue see little

of the jarring edges of what awaits,

and can wait a while yet,

in the bracing solitary morning.

Invocation to Venus

[A]s a poet, a maker of metaphors, Lucretius could do something very strange, something that appears to violate his conviction that the gods are deaf to human petitions. On the Nature of Things opens with a prayer to Venus. … The hymn pours forth, full of wonder and gratitude, glowing with light. It is as if the ecstatic poet actually beheld the goddess of love, the sky clearing at her radiant presence, the awakening earth showering her with flowers. She is the embodiment of desire, and her return, on the fresh gusts of the west wind, fills all living things with pleasure and passionate sexual longing.

—Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. W.W. Norton & Company (2011).

This posting is the first of several I have planned about the remarkable On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.

First page of a 1483 manuscript copy  [Flickr page]

There is a priceless work of ancient literature that rests, now safely copied beyond risk of annihilation, within the world’s digital book databases, web servers, bookstores, and libraries. A few manuscripts from the middle ages survive, along with copies made painstakingly by hand, then printed widely once Gutenberg’s invention came into use.

On the Nature of Things is a poem of 7,400 lines written two thousand years ago by a freethinking Roman named Lucretius. It “yokes together moments of intense lyrical beauty, philosophical meditations on religion, pleasure, and death, and complex theories of the physical world, the evolution of human societies, the perils and joys of sex, and the nature of disease.” ¹ It’s a wonder that it survived the dark ages, escaping the fiery fate of so many other manuscripts that did not conform to the iron-fisted piety of the almighty medieval Church.

And conform it certainly did not. Throughout his remarkable poem, Lucretius denies any divine influence or even interest in the affairs of humans. The universe was not made by the gods, and does not need their help to run its random course. We are all fortunate arrangements of atoms formed into living beings who exist only briefly, and just this once. We have no souls that outlast our bodies, so our pursuit is the happiness and pleasure that these brief lives of ours can offer. When the end comes, it is final, and we must accept it graciously.

Lucretius was very much a materialist. A person “can call the earth ‘Mother of the Gods,’” he allowed, “on this condition— / that he refuses to pollute his mind / With the foul poison of religion.” ² He did not deny the existence of the old gods, just their influence on our world or any interest in it. “By their very nature,” they sat aloof, enjoying “perfect peace” and “immortal life,”

Far separate, far removed from our affairs.
For free from every sorrow, every danger,
Strong in their own powers, needing naught from us,
They are not won by gifts nor touched by anger.³

Whether out of poetic license, some lingering respect for the old traditions, or as a way of easing the pious into his starkly materialist worldview, Lucretius begins his monumental celebration of humanism by addressing one of those gods whose superstitious worship he disdains.⁴ The “Invocation to Venus” is a beautiful and erotic paean to the goddess of love, a celebration of how the “universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction and regeneration, is inherently sexual.” ⁵

Now, for a few minutes, try to forget that you are an occupant of a frantic, attention-limited society twenty centuries after Lucretius scratched out his lines with quill pen on papyrus or parchment. You are browsing a blog with bills to pay and laundry to fold, and that sort of fast reading does not lend itself to the appreciation of thoughts formed in a more deliberate age.

But please do try. Savor the lines below, which have been so artfully translated—from manuscript copies several times removed from the long-lost originals—by an Englishman, John Dryden, three centuries ago. The words are stunning in their glorious sensuality and power, and are a bit daring for stiff-necked readers even today.

And enjoy the pictures interspersed, too. They are samples of my own long-running visual paean to nature, expressing the same ancient appreciation with modern tools.

———

Delight of humankind, and gods above,

Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love!

Whose vital power, Air, Earth, and Sea supplies,

And breeds what e’er is born

beneath the rolling Skies;

For every kind, by thy prolific might,

Springs, and beholds the regions of the light.

Lake Mist Aglow  [Flickr page]

Thee, Goddess, thee the clouds and tempests fear,

And at thy pleasing presence disappear;

For thee the Land in fragrant Flowers is drest;

For thee the Ocean smiles,

and smooths her wavy breast,

And Heav’n itself with more serene

and purer light is blest.

Molokai Shoreline from the Sea  [Flickr page]

For, when the rising Spring adorns the Mead,

And a new Scene of Nature stands displayed,

When teeming Buds, and cheerful greens appear,

And Western gales unlock the lazy year;

The joyous Birds thy welcome first express,

Whose native Songs thy genial fire confess;

Then savage beasts bound o’er their slighted food,

Struck with thy darts, and tempt the raging flood.

Raindrops on Oregon Grape  [Flickr page]

All nature is thy Gift; Earth, Air, and Sea;

Of all that breathes, the various progeny,

Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee.

Purple and Gold  [Flickr page]

O‘er barren Mountains, o’er the flowery Plain,

The leafy forest, and the liquid main,

Extends thy uncontrolled and boundless reign;

Through all the living Regions dost thou move,

And scatterest, where thou goest,

the kindly seeds of Love.

Molokai from the Kamehameha Highway  [Flickr page]

To thee Mankind their soft repose must owe,

For thou alone that blessing canst bestow;

Because the brutal business of the War

Is managed by thy dreadful Servant’s care; ⁶

Who oft retires from fighting fields, to prove

The pleasing pains of thy eternal Love;

And panting on thy breast supinely lies,

While with thy heavenly form

he feeds his famished eyes;

Sucks in with open lips thy balmy breath,

By turns restored to life,

and plunged in pleasing death.

Molokai Pali  [Flickr page]

There while thy curling limbs about him move,

Involved and fettered in the links of Love,

When wishing all, he nothing can deny,

Thy Charms in that auspicious moment try;

With winning eloquence our peace implore,

And quiet to the weary World restore.

Flaming Firs  [Flickr page]

Invocation to Venus quoted from lines 1-27, 43-58 of John Dryden’s 1685 translation, with modern spelling and removal of some archaic contractions (e.g., “fettered” instead of “fetter’d”), as with the version consulted in N. John McArthur, ed. John Dryden, The Complete Poetical Works, N. John McArthur and Lexicos Publishing (2012).

The photography is my own modern contribution to this ancient appreciation of the natural world. Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out my most “interesting” photos on Flickr. All are Copyright © 2013-14 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Notes

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1. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. W. W. Norton & Company (2011), Ch. 8. ↩

2. Book II, 658-660. Ronald Melville, trans. On the Nature of the Universe, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford University Press (1997). ↩

3. Book I, lines 646-51. Melville trans. ↩

4. For a more nuanced view, see George Depue Hadzsits, “The Lucretian Invocation of Venus.” Classical Philology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Apr., 1907), pp. 187-192. Available for free online courtesy of the University of Chicago Press. According to Hadzsits, the “Lucretian invocation of Venus, as a typical Epicurean prayer, must be interpreted in the light of Epicurean theory and practice—a prayer, then, with a deep, complex, religious significance to the sincere Epicurean himself, a prayer that included an emotional attachment to older traditions, to established customs and beliefs, and also an enlightened intellectual, Epicurean interpretation of such religious material.” He finds it “utterly unthinkable that in the Venus invocation Lucretius has been untrue to himself,” with a mere “conventional literary ornament” as a hypocritical pious preamble to his “literary monument to fearless honesty.” ↩

5. Greenblatt, p. 45. ↩

6. The servant was Mars. Melville provides this footnote to the line in his translation: “Venus restraining the warlike impulse of her husband Mars was a frequent subject of ancient as of modern painting (see especially Botticelli’s Venus and Mars). Their union was sometimes allegorized as bringing about harmony: they also look back to the two cosmic principles of ‘Love’ and ‘Strife’ of the fifth-century BC Greek poet Empedocles, who was one of Lucretius’ major models.” ↩

Country Winter

Winter’s cold and quiet days—

muted, grey, quick to darken—

hold life in reserve for Spring.

Blue Boundary  [Flickr page]

Snow hides the undergrowth,

mostly dead now, just seeds and buds,

coiled springs of dormant genomes, waiting.

Clouds and Contrasts  [Flickr page]

Evergreens keep on working, a little,

old needles grasping at furtive light,

biding time until warmth and sun arrives.

Unplowed Driveway  [Flickr page]

With it will come the smell of duff and pine,

growth rings fattening under straining bark,

fresh new green bursting from ends of branches.

Looming Trees on a Country Road  [Flickr page]

The world still spins and circles,

Spring will come, sap will run,

the ancient turnings will continue.

Red Sky at Night, Photographer’s Delight  [Flickr page]

Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out my entire set of these and related photos on Flickr. All are Copyright © 2013-14 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Moving with the Wind

We spend our lives under power,

leaning into the wind.

Sailing on San Francisco Bay  [Flickr page]

Our jaws are set

in grim determination

to overcome it, to push past it,

toward some elusive, never-ending goal.

Golden Gate Bridge from the Bay  [Flickr page]

But every now and then

we can make peace with the wind,

declare our kinship with the here and now,

San Francisco Bay Astern  [Flickr page]

And sail with the easy currents

of unhurried time.

U.S. Coast Guard Station, Golden Gate  [Flickr page]

Written after sailing in San Diego, California in February 2008. Photos from a sail out the Golden Gate and back in San Francisco in July 2013. Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out my entire set of San Francisco on Flickr. All are Copyright © 2013 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Cascading Wonders

In sunlight,

ancient starlight,

the cold dim light of the moon;

Sunset from Haleakala, Maui  [Flickr page]

Gathering silent photons,

noticing and here conveying

beauty we often are too busy to see;

Milky Way between Ponderosa Pines  [Flickr page]

I am a witness

to cascading wonders

of a life being richly lived.

Predawn Moonset at Waikiki  [Flickr page]

Snowflakes

While looking through some old papers the other day, I found a poem I’d written on a piece of scrap paper nearly twenty years ago.

Snowfall  [Flickr page]

The memory is still vivid: I’d been sitting at a table in the cafeteria where I worked, next to a big wall of glass that looked out onto a pleasant Pacific Northwest landscape. Big wet snowflakes filled the air, a stunning array of outrageous white puffs slowly tumbling downward in unison. As I watched, taking it all in, I saw a fellow employee, dressed in his overcoat and carrying a briefcase, emerge from the building and look up.

Looking up at the Snow  [Flickr page]

The snowflakes tumble down lazily.

It’s plenty cold enough.

There is no hurry.

A man walks out the lobby door,

looks around, and his face lights up

with the eager anticipation of a child

at a snowy morning window.

But then

he casts a backward glance

at the watching office windows,

thinks better of himself,

and trudges off,

a businessman again.

Green and Golden Days

Ah, these green and golden days
in the deep and dusky wood...

Where the time till sunset
is long, and warm, and good.

Newtown

Why do we fail our children? Why?

Bring them life, then make them cry?

Take their love of all, that innocence,

twist it into hate that defies all sense

and watch their smiles,

with classmates, die.

 

—First posted on Facebook, 12/15/12

Young Woman

Alyssa Nevala, a second-generation “woman unbound” with a B.A. in Global Studies from the University of Washington. Her mother is a software engineer.

She walks proud and confident

to the university a mile away

and a life much farther

from the thousands of years

that once shackled

and diminished her,

used her womb and its entrance,

and cast the rest aside.

So many ghostly grandmothers

stand watching behind her,

this woman they could never be,

their sufferings and labor quiet

now, as then.

I watch, too; I am a man, after all.

But my admiration is not just visual.

It is also for the unrestrained poise,

the casual steps of feet set free.

She bears a pack full of books.

Not the child of sex feared or forced,

nor a load of wood and water,

nor the silken yoke of helplessness.

Jasmine Beishline, another second-generation “woman unbound.”

She is a woman: young, learning, capable.

A fellow human with her place to be.

She will vote, write, and decide,

perhaps even fight in a war for me.

And yet, I notice, smiling,

she still has chosen,

this woman unbound,

to let the scent of flowers linger in her wake.

—First posted on Facebook, 10/18/12.

———

Thanks to Alyssa and Jasmine for permission to use their Facebook profile pics, and congratulations to their mothers for setting great examples. They’re brilliant women, all of them.

Sailing in a Sea of Humanity

Written at San Francisco International Airport
May 20, 2012

A sea of humanity in San Francisco [Flickr page]

A sea of humanity

washing past me in wave after wave

of endless variety:

ages, colors, styles of dress,

silently borne collections

of thoughts, loves, and creeds.

For once, at last,

they do not break

on the rocks of my judgments.

My mind does not thunder

with the force of their numbers

against my incompatible notions

of what they should be.

No spray of protests flies upwards

from the question once asked continually,

“Why not them, rather than just me?”

Sailing, now, in a sea of humanity

where the waves just move on,

untroubled by the presence

of a mind set free.

———

First posted on Facebook May 20, 2012

The Golden Passage

The last run of the day,

a pleasant glow of fatigue building,

descending from the high elevation sunshine,

my dance with the mountain winding down.

Then, rounding a hillock, I emerge

into a final open slope

and am stunned, gaping

at the beauty of the scene.

The clouds whose light grey tufted tops

I skirted as I skied above

now meet me in a shroud of glowing bronze.

Cast afire by the sun behind me,

incandescent filaments of mist

weave around white-tipped evergreen branches,

suffusing and embracing me with the trees

and the shadow-marked rumpled snow.

The moment will not bear my silence.

I shout aloud in happy awe, in reverence

for the sudden perfection of what I see,

for the synchronized rush of limbs and skis

as I turn and carve my way through this golden passage

consuming in seconds the vista that lay before me.

And yet—past trudging footsteps,

grey and sullen miles homeward,

details quickly faded and heartbeat steadied—

the smile lingers, and awe remains.

—First posted on Facebook, 1/25/11

Autumn Work

A cool Autumn sun slants through the trees, my evergreens

their smells of sap and life still rising in the air around me.

The kids are at school and the woods left quiet,

embracing me in a solitude for once not lonely or empty

but peaceful and still, bidding silent welcome.

I break the silence with the sound and sweat of work:

honest, loud, joyous labor

of chainsaw and tractor, arms and back.

Cutting dead trees free from their silent sentry stands.

Watching, hearing, feeling each dusky thump as they fall.

Then bending over each to notch five times,

for later cutting into fire logs, then splitting, then stacking.

Then cutting the five-length logs to length, and notching the next,

The roaring saw and I dancing a duo in the brush,

two old work companions working together,

notch after notch, log after log.

I heave the seven foot logs onto the waiting loader forks,

their long-dead wood clunking with a nice dry ring

that promises hot fires and warm nights

through the oncoming winter,

which peeks at me through the slanted light and cooling air,

and in the stillness of absent children's voices,

but can wait a little while yet

while I seize and enjoy

this and now.

—September 2, 2010; reposted on
Facebook, August 2012